


Free Man With No Place Free To Go

by silverlining99



Series: Hunters [6]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-17
Packaged: 2017-11-21 08:52:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverlining99/pseuds/silverlining99
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He shouldn't have gone and gotten attached.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Free Man With No Place Free To Go

**Author's Note:**

> Final part of a modern day AU crossover in the Supernatural universe. This will really make no sense without the prior parts. Title from Neko Case's "I Wish I Was The Moon."

Jim has never really understood grief.

It's not that he hasn't seen plenty of it. God, but has he seen plenty of it. It's been there in the faces of too many people fielding his invasive questions about the loss of their loved ones, lurking in their dazed, vacant, haunted eyes. It was in the bow of his mother's head every year like clockwork when the anniversary of his father's death rolled around. It's there, all the time, in Spock's unnatural stillness and in Bones's wild-eyed desperation and in the walls Uhura builds between herself and most of the rest of the world.

So he recognizes grief, easy. He just doesn't _get_ it.

He's never lost anyone that really mattered to him, is the thing. He wasn't even two when his father was killed, couldn't understand, can't even remember when he bothers to try. Which means the closest he's ever come was probably the night Sulu called to tell him, in quiet tones, that Number One had been bitten by a werewolf and that Chris had been with her, had had to be the one to put her out of the inevitable misery. 

Number One had been... well, nice wasn't the right word for it. She had been cool and remote to him, to pretty much _everyone_ but Chris, but she'd also been the one to crack a beer and hand it to him after his first sanctioned hunt.

Jim had liked her.

In the end, though, she'd still been more an acquaintance than a friend. The bigger personal blow was the loss of the man Chris had been before she died. But Chris was still _there_ , and Jim didn't see much point in getting hung up on the particulars of personality changes. Instead of Chris in the field he had Chris at the roadhouse. He wrote it down to a big 'whatever' and moved on.

Now, sitting in that roadhouse and watching Bones absorb the announcement that he's done the impossible, he's pulled off some kind of goddamn miracle and might as well have found the holy grail while he was at it -- Jim thinks he finally understands, and he thinks maybe he fucked up the deal after all. 

Going first should mean being the one who doesn't have to hurt. It should mean that Bones loses him, and not the other way around. 

But he's gone and turned it backwards. He's already lost Bones.

Now he has to live with it.

Ten years is a bitterly short span of time. To Jim, all of a sudden, it also feels like an eternity.

  


  


  


  


Chris, Bones tells him when he asks, when he's recovered the power of speech, has gone for supplies. 

It's a mercy, and no small relief. They don't have time to waste on Chris seeing right through him, his weak explanations, his excuses, his lies. He always has; Jim can't imagine this time would be any different. "We should hit the road," Jim says calmly. "It's a long drive to New York."

He leaves Chris a note. _Milk run, back soon._

Bones is quieter than he's been in awhile. He doesn't gripe about the car, doesn't bitch about Jim's music. He stares out the window and out of the corner of his eye Jim watches his fingers rub at the spot where his wedding ring used to be. As Jim veers through the mountains west of Denver, he finally clears his throat. 

All he says is, "How?"

Jim clenches his jaw and grips the wheel tight. "Caught a lucky break." Bones stares at his profile, silently refuses to leave it at that. "My mom and Frank needed some help with an exorcism, all right? The yellow-bellied fucker gave a go at bartering for a pass."

"Did you give it one?"

Jim glances at him. His eyes are hooded and worried and Jim sees, in an instant, that he can't stand the thought of even something so small being the price of what he so desperately wants. His stomach churns. "I might have implied that I would. What can I say, though -- I'm a lying piece of shit." He trains his eyes on the curve of the road. "I checked it out, Bones. It's the real deal."

"I know that," Bones says quietly.

"Huh?"

"How many times has Scotty called you with leads that didn't pan out, Jim? Ten? More?"

"You knew about that," Jim says, his voice hoarse.

"Yeah. Woke up and heard you talking to him once. Whatever it was you told him to check out, you never mentioned it, so I figured it was a bust and you weren't -- you didn't want to give me false hope."

Jim doesn't answer. He drives and wonders if he's going to be able to make it until the sun goes down. "It's not that I didn't want to," he finally says, a half hour later. "I couldn't. I couldn't be the guy to do that you."

"I knew that, too," Bones informs him mildly. "I was pretty pissed at first. But...thanks."

"Six," Jim replies. "He called six times."

"Then that's six times I owe you for. Jim...damn it. That isn't what I wanted. I never meant for you to protect me from my own damn shitstorm of a life."

Jim reaches for the dial on the radio. "Don't mention it, all right? No big deal."

Which is exactly what it is, he tells himself viciously. No big deal at all.

  


  


  


  


When Jim was sixteen, Frank started bringing Todd Mitchell home for dinner. Jim's mother pursed her lips over it but simply shrugged when Jim asked what was wrong. "Todd glamorizes it," she said quietly. "Do me a favor and keep that in mind."

Todd and Frank drank a lot of beers, told a lot of stories. Todd's son Gary was eighteen and made out of lean muscle and casual boredom, and he watched Jim like he knew something about him. A few months later Frank and Todd left on a hunt, took Winona along for extra manpower. Gary came over while they were gone and taunted Jim about being scrawny, being weak. Jim threw a punch and went down with him in a heap of flailing limbs; Gary pinned him down with a forearm to the throat.

They fucked on the floor, right there in front of God and his mother's china hutch.

Having a dude's cock up his ass was, in the end, less of a revelation than how Gary just saw right through him. "You're itching for it," he'd said, panting it out while his palms held Jim's shoulders down, while his hips worked in rolling snaps. "You want to get out there and waste something, too."

The thing about Gary was, he didn't give a damn about Jim. Jim knew that and didn't particularly mind. Attention alone falls drastically short of anything resembling love or even affection, but Jim has always found it mercifully easy to read and interpret. He's always liked the transparency of it. Gary _saw_ him, and he took it one step further and made Jim feel tangible things, lust and attraction and the rush of orgasm.

He didn't need more than that. The last thing he wanted was to wind up like Frank, for fuck's sake. His stepfather had met Winona much the way Jim had met Bones, had helped her get closure and then kept going, loving her and marrying her and settling into a life of concessions. He raised her kid and he disappeared for the same week every year to let his wife have her time to mourn another man. Jim has never really liked the guy all that much, but he's sure as hell had moments of feeling sorry for him.

These days he finds himself sympathizing with him, too. The both of them, they should have just done the job and moved along.

They shouldn't have gone and gotten attached. _That_ is the game changer. Jim gets that now.

  


  


  


  


In Nebraska he puts his foot down about stopping for the night, just past Lincoln. "I need a bed," he says before Bones can even open his mouth to protest, to insist they stay on the road. "So do you. Don't even try to tell me you think you can get decent sleep in here."

"I'll get decent sleep when I have my daughter," Bones mutters. But he shuts his mouth after that, lets Jim check them into a crappy motel. When they're lying in the dark, when Jim's hovering on the edge of sleep, his voice cuts the silence. "Jim."

"Yeah."

"I don't -- goddamn it. I don't know her name. I can't get it out of my head that I don't know her damn name."

Jim clears his throat, yawns. "Joanna." He hears a small catch of breath behind him and rolls onto his back, speaks towards the ceiling. "Sulu told me. I sent him and Chekov to scope things out."

It's not a lie, not exactly. It is, in fact, entirely true. So what if he happened to know the girl's name even before he got Sulu's call? It's just another of the rules he lives by: truth is a funny, brutal thing, all too able to be manipulated, molded, parceled out in tolerable doses.

This one will come out in the end, all of it. Someday he's going to have to give it to Bones all at once -- the good and the bad of it, the guilt-inducing, the infuriating.

But not today. Bones is quiet for a long time. When he turns over and kisses Jim slowly, gratefully, something dark and angry, bitter and cold, crawls across the surface of Jim's thoughts. 

He shoves it aside and lets Bones have what he wants.

Giving him this, at least, involves holding nothing back.

In the morning he wakes to Bones dressed and ready to go, sitting on the side of the bed and mumbling exorcism rites under his breath. "Tell me you slept," Jim grumbles.

"I slept," he says shortly. "Lay off."

Jim shakes his head and stumbles into the shower.

  


  


  


  


His first hunt was a bust. Gary swore up and down that a wichtlein had to be responsible for a series of odd deaths at a quartzite mine up in Minnesota.

It wasn't a wichtlein. It was just three days gone after taking off with Gary in a car they hotwired from a junkyard on the outskirts of town, and two nights in a cash-only motel in Blue Earth where Gary alternated hours of drilling him on fairy lore with hours of just plain drilling him. 

Gary wasn't the romantic sort by any stretch of the imagination, and Jim's imagination wasn't prone to going in such directions in the first place. 

There might, though, there might have been a moment -- a moment when Jim realized the entire thing was nothing but a series of unfortunate accidents and Gary smirked like he'd known all along -- when Jim thought that dragging him out on a wild goose chase was possibly one of the nicer things anyone had ever done for him. When he thought that it might actually mean something.

Just a moment. By the time Gary dropped him off and left him to face his mother's wrath alone, it had definitely passed.

Never happened again.

  


  


  


  


Chicago and Cleveland and Buffalo pass in a blur. In Syracuse he stops again. Bones glares at him. "It's only noon. We can keep going. I'll drive."

Jim stares at the Motel 6 sign. "No. We're only a couple hours out and we need to rest and plan. She'll still be there tomorrow."

"How can you be --"

"Because if I were gonna get sold out on this one, it would have happened already, all right?"

"What does that even mean? Who knows about this who would actually --"

Jim rubs his eyes and opens the car door. "Bad choice of words, forget it. Just shut up and fucking _trust_ me for once, is the point. I've got this."

In the room he rents, Bones drops his duffel and stares at him, grim in the face. "All I do is trust you."

"No, actually, taking my help because you're hedging your bets that I'm the best option isn't the same as trust," Jim snaps. Bones gapes at him and he ignores it as he pulls out his laptop. "Don't worry about it, it's nothing we don't all do. Sulu and Chekov should have sent more info by now -- we should go over it."

No sooner has he opened it does the laptop shut with a loud click under Bones's heavy hand. "Hold your goddamn horses. You think I've stuck with you all this time because of what you might be able to _do_ for me?"

"Haven't you?" Jim shrugs. "Like I said, don't worry about it. We need to talk about your wife."

"She's not my wife," Bones snaps. "Jim --"

He doesn't know why he's doing this. He doesn't know why he's trying so damn hard to throw away what little time he has left, along with everything else. "She might be," he cuts in. It's cruel, but he tells himself it has to be done. Honesty starts here. "You don't actually know when she was possessed. What if we can get her back and she _is_ the woman you fell in love with?"

Bones drops heavily into a chair. "I hope we can," he says quietly. Jim keeps tight control on his expression. "Get her back. Give her her life back. But Jim...I'm not the man I was when I married her. I'm not even the man I was a year ago. My daughter is all I want from that life."

Jim turns away. If anything, he feels worse. It shouldn't even be possible. "Jim," Bones presses. "Goddamn it, do you even -- Washington. After we left Scotty."

His fists clench involuntarily. Fucking _Washington_. Maybe that was the beginning of the end, where the two of them are concerned. "What about it?"

"That's when I realized that being relieved you came back for me had shit-all to do with finding them. I was out of my fucking mind relieved that _you_ came back for _me_." When Jim doesn't say anything, Bones makes a frustrated noise. "Are you even fucking _hearing_ me, Jim?"

Slowly, Jim turns on his heel. He flashes a smile, forces it. "Loud and clear, Bones," he says. He feels like he should say something else, something _more_ , but he can't find the words. "Let's get to work, okay? No half-cocked bullshit, not this time. This one's personal."

A small answering smile tugs at Bones's mouth. "I thought half-cocked bullshit was hardwired in your genetic code."

"Medical opinion?"

"Clinical observation." Bones watches him sit and open the laptop again. "Listen, after this is done --"

"What do you say we talk about after this is done, _after_ this is done." Jim avoids his eyes. "One thing at a time, Bones, okay? Keep your eye on the ball and all that shit."

  


  


  


  


The second and last time he went hunting with Gary, it was to a house three towns over where Gary'd heard rumors of a haunting. Gary snuck him out and Jim felt like a total badass, right up to the moment when he fell through a rotting section of floorboards in the condemned house.

He landed flat on his back on a fucking grand piano and a storm of dust. Footsteps sounded and Jim dropped his head back over the edge of the piano, coughed and bled as booted feet approached and an upside-down face peered at him with a distinct air of amused curiosity. "You all right, son?"

Without even knowing him, Chris has never been surprised by a damn thing Jim does.

The time on that, Jim knows, is rapidly running out.

Just like the time on everything else.

  


  


  


  


The house is small, tucked at the end of a quiet street in Schenectady. The lease and utilities are all listed under Jocelyn Treadway, and the neighbors know her as a widow raising her daughter alone. When she's not at work she keeps to herself, odd for the type of neighborhood, but understandable in light of how recent whatever tragedy took her husband must have been.

Bones snorts at that detail of Sulu's intel. Jim finds it to be a surprisingly mild reaction, but doesn't remark on it. "While she's at work," he says instead. "That's when we go in. Chekov hacked her alarm company and got the code, so as long as we get in unnoticed we'll have plenty of time to set things up. You remember how to draw them?"

Grabbing a pad of motel stationary, Bones scrawls out a devil's trap from memory and looks at Jim, challenge in his eyes. Jim just watches him steadily. "She'll try anything," he says. "Don't believe a single fucking word that comes out of her mouth, no matter what."

"Won't be a problem."

"And you follow my lead." Bones rolls his eyes. Jim slams his hand against the table. "I'm not fucking around, Bones. We screw this up, she'll disappear again and I guarantee you she will be gone for good. Finding her isn't a trick I can pull off twice."

Bones scowls at him. "Why do I keep getting the feeling there's something you're not telling me?"

"I've told you everything you need to know. Decide now if that's good enough, because we do this by my rules or you're on your own."

"Jim --"

"Decide. Now."

" _Fine_ ," Bones snaps. "Have it your own damn way."

Jim looks away. Eye on the ball. It's a day for focusing on things that are actually possible.

  


  


  


  


The night they met, Chris shooed Gary off home and took Jim back to his motel to deal with the oozing gash running up the side of his leg. "I knew your father, you know," he said absently, and splashed disinfectant across the wound. 

"Bullshit."

"Knew your mom once upon a time, too." Chris cast a sidelong smirk at Number One, who was silently sharpening a machete in the corner. "Second hottest woman I ever had threaten me with a deadly weapon. Funny, I never would have thought Winona Kirk'd raise an idiot for a son."

"Fuck you," Jim muttered. "My mom's not hot."

Chris stopped chuckling around the time he finished wrapping Jim's calf in clean gauze. He gave him a lift back to Riverside and in the driveway he glanced over. "Do me a favor," he said. "Keep yourself in one piece another year or two and then give me a call. I'd like a shot at training you up right, if you're bound and determined to live this life."

Jim scowled out the window at the blaze of lights in the house. "I don't know you, man. Or how to _reach_ you."

Chris laughing at him was rapidly becoming a theme. "Your mom does. Offer's only good if you can convince her, son -- that is not a woman I need after my hide twice in one lifetime."

"Chickenshit." Jim reached for the door handle and paused. "Can I ask you something? Uh...my dad -- "

"Your father," Chris said with a sigh, "was a fine man who put the people he loved before his own life. You and me, Jim, we may never talk again, but I want you to remember this: might be that none of us want to follow his example, but every damn one of us worth our salt hopes to live up to it. Come find me when you're on board for that."

On his eighteenth birthday, Jim left the house with a duffel bag and an address.

He didn't look back all the way to Mojave.

  


  


  


  


The morning goes smoothly. The breaking, the entering, the setting of the traps. All there is left is the waiting, and they do it sitting in the shadows with a clock ticking the background. "Bones," Jim says quietly, into the silence. "The kid -- Joanna. She might be...she might be more than you can handle."

"She won't be."

"She might be," he insists. "You need to _listen_ to me. What she is, these things are created for a _reason_ and it's sure as hell not maternal instinct. I'm risking the fucking world on the idea that you can make something else of her; the least you could do is tell me if I need to worry about you taking the attempt too far."

For a long time, Bones stays slumped over his knees, fingertips pressed to the bridge of his nose. When he finally looks up, his gaze is clear and direct. "I can't talk to you about what ifs right now," he says bluntly. "There's nothing in front of me yet, Jim. There's only what I _had_."

"And what the hell was that?" Jim snaps. "What the fuck was it that you can't let go of?"

"My _daughter_ ," Bones grinds out. "Do you understand, I delivered her and I held her and for five goddamn minutes I felt more whole than I ever had before. She was a baby, Jim. Nothing less, nothing more. Cut me some slack on planning for her being anything else when that's all I have, would you?" When Jim stares at him and doesn't respond, he sighs. "Two people in my life, Jim. Two people of all the thousands I've ever known have driven me to craziness with the need to hold on tight. Give me a chance to see if I can have both at once. Just a chance."

Bones told him once that it wasn't going to be anything that Jim did that wound up breaking him.

His mother told him, more than once, that there's a fool born every minute.

She always had been smarter than he wanted to give her credit for.

  


  


  


  


Chris's idea of training him turned out to be moving him into a back room with a table piled high with books, teaching him to tend bar, and forbidding him from discussing anything but drink orders with the hunters who rolled through.

"You can talk when you have the slightest clue what you're talking _about_ ," Chris told him mildly, the one time he asked. "Table three's still waiting on that pitcher, you know."

Six months in Chris joined him behind the bar and nodded vaguely to a man sitting down at the end, hunched over and scribbling in a journal. "Been waiting for him to show up. I wanted you to get a good look."

"At what?"

"At why you're being treated to my incredible hospitality," Chris said dryly. "You were headed towards a brink, son, and that's what the other side looks like. He lost someone, hell of a long time ago."

Jim rolled his eyes and rubbed his forefinger across his thumb in a mockery of a violin. Chris elbowed him, hard. "He spends his life on the road for the most part. Drags his boys along with him, pretty much always has. Now you listen to me: you're off the leash from here on out, but you're to remember one thing if you insist on forgetting or ignoring everything else." Jim watched him, waited. "I don't care if it's your mother's house, or here, or somewhere else entirely, but you make sure you always have a place you call home. Tether yourself to something, Jim, or you'll wind up loose in the wind."

Jim nodded.

Honestly, though, he wasn't sure freedom like that sounded half bad.

  


  


  


  


For once, everything goes according to plan.

It's almost like fate, Jim think grimly. Sulu tracked heat patterns in the house for days, and true to form Jocelyn carries the girl straight to her crib before heading to her own room. Jim is waiting, tucked behind the door, when she walks right under the trap painted on the ceiling.

He's supposed to wait. He's supposed to call Bones off his guard of the ground floor and _wait_ , share this moment, let it be revenge.

Instead he swings the door shut and flips the lock. "If you have last words," he says quietly, "now's the time for them."

Footsteps pound up the stairs and fists batter the door. "Jim, you son of a bitch, let me in!"

Things are quieter inside the room. Jocelyn watches him with the eerie calm of any creature accepting its fate. "I'll climb my way out eventually," she says. "He won't see mercy from me twice."

"By the time you have a chance in hell," Jim says, just as calm, "I expect I'll be there doing my damnedest to keep you where you belong."

"You have no idea what she'll be capable of."

"Yeah, you know? I do, actually." Jim hardens his gaze. "And I'd much rather her be in his hands than yours, for the same reason you choosing him was such a mistake."

She tries to look bored but he can see the curiosity in her narrowed eyes. "Really," she drawls.

And Jim smirks, nods toward the door that's still rattling under Bones's fists. "He's a stubborn one," he admits. "And if he thinks there's a shred of good in someone, he'll never give up on 'em. No way on earth that man would leave in a baby in your clutches -- especially not his _own_ baby."

"He's a sentimental fool," she spits.

"You're one to talk."

Her laugh is rich, throaty. "You think I care for the child? Like I said -- you have no idea."

"Yeah, well. Good thing I was already planning to figure it out without your help."

In the end she goes as quietly as she must have crept in.

She leaves a dead woman in her wake.

  


  


  


  


Jim ran into Gary again when he was twenty-four. He wrapped a job in Wisconsin the week before his mom's birthday, and he decided to be a decent son for once and swing down to see her. 

He saw Gary first, looked up from lodging a gas nozzle into his tank when he felt the weight of a lingering gaze on him. 

Gary, it turned out, grew up to drive a Prius and wear a cheap suit. It took everything in Jim not to burst out laughing on the spot. Instead he tipped his head in brief acknowledgment and eyed the child seat he could see through the windshield. For a second he thought Gary was going to talk to him, that he was doomed for some awkward conversation where they talked or didn't talk about their history, where they talked or didn't talk about how three years ago Todd had died under mysterious circumstances in Miami, and Gary had come home alone.

But in the end Gary capped off his tank and drove away without a word; he used his blinker as he pulled into traffic. At his mom's Jim asked, and Winona watched him for a long time. "Gary went a different way," she finally said. "He's married now, has a little boy. I see him now and then in town, but we don't talk. He seems to prefer it that way."

Last Jim heard, Gary'd made his way onto the city council and coached his kid's T-ball team on weekends. Sometimes Jim wondered if he was happy, if he'd lost the dull cast to his stare that Jim had been sure he'd seen at the gas station.

Jim doubted it. He knew that look, had seen it before.

Gary, he was pretty sure, never came back from Miami at all.

  


  


  


  


"It happens sometimes," Jim tells Bones, after letting him in and watching him kneel, check Jocelyn's pulse. "Illness, injury. Some people just...fade. The demon was all that was keeping her going."

Bones smooths her eyelids shut with his fingertips before settling his palm on her face. His touch is gentle and Jim turns from it. He has better things to do than ruminate on Bones's capacity to forgive the people who hurt him the worst. "We should go," he says tightly.

Joanna is still trapped in her crib, clutching the bars and bawling, her fat cheeks red and glistening. Jim watches Bones approach, watches him lean to scoop her into his arms. She shrieks and struggles but his hands are gentle, his voice a quiet murmur that slowly cuts through her instinctive fear. "Shh, sweetheart," he whispers, and cradles her head to his shoulder. "It's okay. You're gonna be okay. I've got you. I've _got_ you."

Jim walks out.

In Syracuse, Sulu meets them at the rental lot. "Pavel's waiting," he informs them, grinning at the sight of the carrier clutched in Bones's hand. "Cute kid."

Bones rolls his eyes. Sulu drives them across town to where Jim stashed the 'Vette. Chekov is there with a plain sedan. "I rented in Philadelphia. We will go to Pittsburgh to get one for you, then I will return."

"Jim?" Bones asks. "You'll meet me in Ohio?"

"I'll be there," Jim says evenly. "I'm gonna bounce. Bones..." He smiles wryly. "He's right. Cute as hell -- she's got your eyes. It's all been worth it, you know?"

It's as good a way to tell the truth as any, he figures.

Before he can pull away, Sulu taps his hood and leans in the window. "Chris called me this morning," he says. His tone is carefully casual. "Wanted to know if I'd heard from you. He sounded pissed."

"You tell him anything?"

"I happened to lose reception right around them. Weird."

Jim grins. "Thanks, man. Don't worry about it, we're headed there anyway. You guys be safe."

  


  


  


  


Six months after Number One died, Jim finally showed his face in the roadhouse again. He'd been neck-deep in poltergeists in Maine when Sulu called, and from there he landed in one hunt and then another, jobs spanning the months and the country. It was a blazing summer day when he ran out of road and excuses all at once, and he walked in to find Chris sprawled in a chair under one of the ceiling fans, a sweating beer dangling from his fingers. "Spare one of those for me?" Jim asked from the door.

Three hours later he lifted his head from the scarred surface of a table and gestured clumsily with his bottle. "Hey, you remember when we met? You said something to me that was like, right on."

Chris chuckled softly. "I said a lot of things to you that night, Jim. I just wasn't under the impression you heard a damn one of them."

"I heard," Jim retorted. "I didn't _care_. Big difference. Anyway, you were right. She was -- she was _way_ hotter than my mom."

All Jim could do was wait, wait and see what was going to happen. He spent months on the road bracing for just this conversation and never could figure out what to say or what to expect. He grew up with his mother leaving it to other people to tell him about his father; she never wanted to talk about him. He could count on one hand the times Spock voluntarily disclosed anything about the family he lost in one fell swoop, and he'd long since given up on knowing what the hell even drove Uhura into their way of life.

Maybe that was just how it went, Jim figured. Maybe the dead belonged in the past, where they once existed.

Except even as Chris's laughter faded, his smile didn't. It simply took on a nostalgic cast. "All due respect to your mother," he finally said, "you're damn right she was."

"You're not going back out, are you?" Jim asked. "This isn't a break."

"No," Chris admitted. "I can't do the job anymore, Jim. Not without her."

"You did it before her."

"People change. People change _you_." Chris fished fresh beers from the bucket of ice at his feet and slid one across the table. "Give it time, son. You might actually understand what I mean someday."

  


  


  


  


His phone vibrates while he's streaking through Iowa, a stone's throw from another life he left behind. It's Chris, for the fifth time. Jim answers at last. "Yeah."

Chris doesn't say anything right away. And then finally: "Tell me it wasn't you. Tell me it wasn't either of you."

"Not really enough to go on, man."

"Uhura's been keeping her ear to the ground, you know. Always listening for anything that could lead to the kid."

"Yeah, so?"

"Funny thing. Last thing she picked up was rumor that the pit's holding a fresh I.O.U. on a hunter."

"Gotta tell you," Jim says evenly, watching the road spilling out in front of him like it goes on forever. He knows better. "That doesn't sound all that funny to me."

"Jim --"

"You always knew," Jim cuts in. "I never had a fucking clue about all you sad bastards and the things you couldn't let go of -- you knew. Everyone else assumed I do this because of my dad, but you never did. You called me on it. You knew I still had to find my reason." Chris is silent. "Well, I found it. I get it. I get how far actually giving a flying fuck will make you willing to go."

"Jesus, Jim, what have you done?"

"Nothing I regret," he says. He realizes a smile is pulling at his lips. "Come on. That's gotta count for something."

Chris's breath whistles over the line. "Does he know?" he finally asks.

"Nah. It'd just burst his bubble. I think he's earned some time with the weight off his shoulders, don't you?"

"What about you, Jim? What about everything you've earned?"

Jim checks the rearview mirror, nods briefly at the sight of Bones trailing him, not too far behind. "What do you think it was that I bargained for?" he says easily. "Chris...for ten whole years, I get everything I never knew I wanted. That's a hell of a deal." He laughs shortly. "Pun intended."

"Jim." Chris's voice catches. "I... _Fuck_. You --"

Jim's eyes sting; he blames the setting sun. "Gotta go. We'll be back soon, you can bitch at me as long as you want."

After a long moment, Chris just sighs. "Come on home, son. I'll leave the lights on."


End file.
